Monday, April 29, 2013

The Travel Issue by David Shrigley is the 19th issue of the Thing Quarterly, and is both late and timely. To truly function as a quarterly this project should have been available months ago (I seem to recall the 18th issue by Mike Mills was released at least as early as last autumn). A teaser video was posted a while back, but it was starting to seem as though there was a serious hold-up in production. But given Shrigley's Turner Prize nomination last week, this is a pretty wise time to announce the issue. I suspect it will sell out quickly. Thirteen of the previous eighteen are no longer available (Martin Creed, Trisha Donnelly, Miranda July, etc. etc.).

The multiple consists of a leather travel wallet foil stamped with the title and containing a 24 page passport book. In addition to this are four double-sided cards containing travel phrasebook-like texts such as "Can I have your shoes?”, "Please Help Me", “Please Don't Help me”, "It wasn't my Idea" and "Hey You Light My Pipe".

It's available for $95.00, or as part of a 4-work subscription package for $240. The next three artists in the series are by Tauba Auerbach, Ben Marcus and John Baldessari.

Sunday, April 28, 2013

"Darmstaedter Werkblock" contains film stills of Tacita Dean's film of the same title. "At the end of September 2007, the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt closed for renovation…[which was to include the] restoration of the seven-room installation by Joseph Beuys known as Block Beuys, 1970–86. The walls of the rooms are famously covered in brown and beige jute and the floors are carpeted. Beuys worked on the installation himself over many years, adding and changing things up to his death. The rooms continue to carry the aura of this activity and so the museum’s decision to remove the jute and carpet has caused great upset among lovers of Block Beuys worldwide. The controversy centers on the fact that Beuys never made particular reference to the jute walls, allowing the assumption that they are not relevant to any question of renovation. Just prior to the museum’s closure, Dean painstakingly filmed the walls, the carpet and any detail of the gallery décor, which was soon to be replaced, seeing them as analogous to the entropy in and of Beuys’s art, whilst carefully avoiding any sighting of the work itself."--Text from the publisher.

Saturday, April 27, 2013

More than 400 pages of Porter's found art and visual poetry, mostly collaged interdictions from magazines and catalogues: “don’t let infants play with balloons”, “don’t wait on tomorrow”, “don’t bet on the rain”, “don’t rub it in, lift it out”, and “please don’t sit this one out”.

Here Comes Everybody’s Don’t Book was originally conceived of as part of a seven-part series of Founds, alongsideFound Poems, The Book of Do’s, and Sweet End. The last three books, The Book of Light, The Devil’s Wishbone, and The Porter Book remain unpublished.

Friday, April 26, 2013

Last Saturday (Record Store Day) saw the release of Stephen Malkmus' cover of Can's Ege Bamyasi LP, gorgeously packaged with a David Shrigley design. The cover was hand printed on thick card stock in Germany by Slowboy, and Shrigley's contribution is more than a cover image. He has hand written every credit on the LP, and designed the disks labels, as well as the original poster for the gig (not included in the package). The disk is available in a limited edition of 3500, on green vinyl, from Matador.

The original record was released 41 years ago and the Malkmus remake was recorded live in December 2012, during Week-End Fest in Cologne, Germany, with local band Von Spar backing him.

SPIN's Marc Hogan noted at the time: "It's a thrill to see such an oft-geeked-out-about indie rocker playing some of the strange music he has geeked out to for so long, and the influence of the German prog-rockers' free-flowing, dissociative approach on Pavement's records is clear — though part of what's fun here is hearing Malkmus get funky."

Thurston Moore (the subject of much debate this week after the Kim Gordon Elle Magazine article), on the original:

"I found Ege Bamyası in the 49-cent bin at Woolworth's. I didn’t see anything written about Can, I didn’t know anything about them except this okra can on the cover, which seemed completely bizarre. I finally picked that record up, and I completely wore it out. It was so alluring. Something about it made Can seem to be playing outside of rock 'n' roll. It was unlike anything else I was hearing at the time."

Watch a clip of the live performance of One More Nighthere, and Pinch and Soup, here.

Yesterday David Shrigley was announced as one of four finalists for the £40,000 Turner Prize.

An audio performance of the artist typing the phrase "fuck off" a thousand times, a companion to his gridded works of the same name. Housed in a gatefold digipack elegantly designed by Lauren Wickware, and featuring liner notes by curator Christina Ritchie.

The use of the typewriter as a musical instrument can be traced back, I think, to Erik Satie's Parade, from 1917. Typewriters, alongside milk bottles and a fog horn, were used as musical instruments in the score, though these were apparently added by Jean Cocteau, who was directing the ballet for which the music was composed. Satie was reportedly not amused.

However, the typewriter continued as a staple for 20th century composers, and has been used by John Cage, Steve Reich and a slew of others. Pop songs (Down All the Days by the Pogues and Exhuming McCarthy by REM come to mind) have also employed the sound, though mostly as an effect.

I recently read that when making The Shining, Stanley Kubrick recorded a typist typing "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy"over and over again, for the scenes in which we see Jack typing, but cannot see the pages. To the trained ear it is thought that each key on a typewriter has a slightly different sound, so in order to maintain authenticity, he insisted that the actual words be typed.

A Thousand Times Fuck Off is available at Art Metropole, here, for $25.00.

“I do not want to give these images explanations: descriptions by the finder about how and where they were found, or guesses as to what stories they might or might not tell. I want them to keep the silence of the fleamarket; the silence they had when I found them; the silence of the lost object. Suffice to say, that all the images were found over the last six or so years in fleamarkets in Europe and America. Only at a certain point did I realise I was making a collection, and nothing is more worrying to the collector than the prospect of ‘closure’; the realisation that there will be a ‘final version’ and a potential end to the collection. I have stopped going to fleamarkets for fear of finding an image that ‘should have been in the book’, or have distractedly turned my attention to collecting postcards: postcards that show frozen fountains or four-leaf clovers, or have seagulls in them, or have been scribbled on by someone. But now I have resolved to believe that there is no, and can never be, a final version to this collection; that FLOH exists in the continuum and will one day, I hope, return, ownerless and silent to its origins in the fleamarket.”

- Tacita Dean

The contents of the book can be seen in an animated video on vimeo, here.

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Congrats to David Platzker, who has just been hired as a curator in the the Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Prints and Illustrated Books. He will work on exhibitions, special projects, and acquisitions initiatives with the department’s chief curator, Christophe Cherix.

Platzker was the director of Printed Matter for several years, and then the proprietor of Specific Object, which he founded in 2004. He coauthored Printed Stuff: Prints, Posters, and Ephemera by Claes Oldenburg: a Catalogue Raisonné 1958–1996, and published a number of multiples, including Oldenburg's NYC Pretzel.

"Platzker's long-standing commitment to the study of artists' books, multiples, and ephemera will be a tremendous asset to the department. His research, publications, and curatorial projects over the past twenty years have helped redefine a broader notion of the field of printmaking," said Cherix. "He will play an important role in managing the Museum's extraordinarily comprehensive Fluxus holdings and facilitating cross-departmental projects."

Between Steven Leiber's death a little over a year ago and Specific Object closing (Platzker will shutter its doors in three weeks, when he begins his new position) the secondary market for artists' books and multiples is two experts poorer.

La Bibliothèque Fantastique is a virtual publisher of free downloadable artists' books. Primarily exclusive productions, supplemented by the occasional re-edition, the books are produced in black and white so that they may be printed on any home printer.

Today is the final day for a short exhibition that opened last Thursday called Un Phénomène de Bibliothèque, at the Paris artist-run centre Immanence. The show features bookworks by dozens of artists, including Nancy Barton, Antoine Lefebvre, Stéphane Mallarmé, Côme Mosta-Heirt, Davida Newman, Filip Noterdaeme, Laurent Okroglic, Gérald Panighi, Michalis Pichler, Olaf Probst, Eric Rondepierre, Alice Wang, Lawrence Weiner and many others.

For more information, visit the gallery site here. For an introductory video, visit the La Bibliothèque Fantastique website, here.

Dedicated to Artists’ books, multiples, recordings, postcards, magazines and ephemera, this site will feature reviews of recent titles, features on artists and publishers, random listings of older works, the occasional longer essay or interview, straight-forward pictorials,links to recent news, etc. etc., in an attempt to create an aggregate of information on editioned artworks.

About Me

Dave Dyment is an artist, writer and curator based in Toronto, Canada. He is the co-editor of "One for Me and One to Share: Artists Multiples and Editions" (YYZ Books, 2012). His own work can be viewed at www.dave-dyment.com. He is represented by MKG127.